After several online travel agents (OTAs), including Booking.com and Kayak, reportedly removed Ryanair’s content from their sites in early December, it not only resulted in a share price drop of nearly 5% but major backlash from the airline.
In November, Ryanair claimed that several OTAs were overcharging travellers.
“It gives us no pleasure to rank Kiwi.com as Europe’s biggest OTA pirate in our November survey, charging unsuspecting consumers €24,40 (R502) for an allocated seat which cost just €5,50 (R113) on Ryanair.com,” said Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s CEO, according to Travel Weekly.
Several OTAs wrote to the Civil Aviation Authority and the Information Commissioner’s Office in August, citing unfair treatment of those booking flights and that the airline’s practices infringed on data protection rights.
“With the multiple investigations by Europe-wide consumer organisations and competition authorities looking into the actions of Ryanair, it comes as no surprise that we see yet another PR blitz from them in an attempt to divert attention and slur the reputations of the competition, using hand-selected information not reflective of the much bigger scale of combinations and options that OTAs bring their customers and Ryanair can’t,” commented a spokesperson from Kiwi.com.
The low-cost carrier rubbished these claims, emphasising that its approach ensured that it could directly communicate with passengers and “not via an OTA bot”.
“Ryanair will respond to this welcome removal of our flights from OTA pirate websites by lowering fares where necessary to encourage all passengers to book directly on Ryanair.com where they are guaranteed to always get the lowest airfares... In the meantime, Ryanair continues to make its fares available to honest/transparent OTAs such as Google Flights,” a spokesperson for the airline told Sky News.
